A study investigated the conditions and processes that stimulate questions in adults. During the experiment, the amount of effort required to assimilate a prose text was manipulated and the influence of this factor on the number of questions asked as well as on the capacity of retaining information was examined. This was done by activating knowledge and stereotyped series of actions (scripts) and varying new input information. A description of an action was read significantly faster when it was preceded by an activated script from which it was derived (predictive understanding) than when it followed a nonrelated, activated script (break in understanding). There was only a faint correlation between the number of questions asked and the effort required to assimilate the text material. With scrambled-order stories, however, significantly more subjects asked at least one question when they came to the experimental sequence. Stories arousing concurrent expectations and requiring an average effort of understanding was recalled more accurately than those inducing a specific script expectation, whether the new information fulfilled the expectation (lesser effort at understanding) or not (higher effort at understanding). (Author/HTH)